Gongol.com Archives: May 2025
May 31, 2025
The good news, from research conducted at Northwestern University, is that explicit forms of negative bias are on the decline. 1.4 million people from 33 different countries were asked to identify their personal preferences over matters like sexual orientation and skin color. Broadly speaking, people all over the place showed a significant decrease (from 2009 to 2019) in their willingness to express negative biases. ■ The bad news from the same research is that when people were tested for their automatic (or implicit) reactions, their gut feelings didn't consistently match the things they were willing to express explicitly. Word-association tests showed that negative biases were still lingering beneath the surface. ■ People are complex, and quite often inconsistent. We tend to like to see ourselves as protagonists on the right side of history, and yet it's hard to make sure our instincts align with the things we know are right and wrong when we really think about them. ■ The research shouldn't be cause for despair. After all, the positive trends in those explicit attitudes are worth celebrating. But the results should also compel us to think about closing those gaps between what we aspire to be and where our instincts take us. ■ The psychologist Viktor Frankl is credited (perhaps erroneously) with the concept of creating a gap between stimulus and response -- that is, of taking a beat between what we see or experience in the world and how we proceed to react to it. Even if the credit is apocryphal, the idea is consistent with Frankl's concept of logotherapy. ■ Learning to consciously think about that gap -- even if it's only taking a single second or pausing for a deep breath -- isn't just the right thing to do when you're the stressed-out parent of a newborn, it's the right thing to practice even when you're under no stress at all. That's how we help train (or re-train) our instincts so that they reflect those higher aspirations we are comfortable expressing aloud. It takes practice to overcome our instinctive wiring.
